


All Spring and All Summer

by katajainen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Blacksmith Thorin (tangential), Blue Mountains | Ered Luin, Brothers, Durin Family Feels, Gen, Life in Ered Luin, Parent-Child Relationship, Pre-Quest, Worldbuilding lite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 12:54:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8579359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katajainen/pseuds/katajainen
Summary: On most days, five years' age difference might not mean much.
On the day Fíli gets to travel with his uncle and Dwalin and go smithing in the towns and villages of Men, but Kíli has to stay behind, those years mean everything.
What is he to do with himself all spring and all summer without his brother?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [at my tumblr](https://katajainen.tumblr.com/).

Fee has five years on me, but it hasn’t mattered for ages, not for years and tens of years. The _last_ time was when he got his first proper knife and I was too small and couldn’t have any, but we were _both_ wee snotty pebbles back then.

It’s unfair, that’s what it is. How does he get to go with Uncle and Mister Dwalin and go smithing for the Menfolk? It’s not that he’s even _good_ at it. _I’m_ better than him at the forge, and Fee knows it. Uncle Thorin knows it – so why won’t he take _me_ with him?

They say I’m too young. But I’m as tall as Fee. I’m going to be taller, and stronger too. I could be useful. I can hunt. I’m _good_ at the forge. I want to see the world too.

He’ll be gone all spring and all summer.

The morning they go I wake first. Fee still sleeps and I think I could hide his boots. All his boots. But that would only give me until tomorrow. I take my lucky stone instead, my adder stone that I found and polished until it’s nice and shiny, and I drop it in his left boot. He’ll find it there; and I’ve put a leather thong through the hole so he can wear it on his neck like I do.

There are snakes about in spring and summer.

I finish my breakfast and Fee still sleeps, the lazy sod. _Amad_ goes to wake him, and before she gets back I’m far into the corridors and going up, running climbing stairs dark and soft with stone-dust and mould where no-one ever goes but Fee and I. I don’t think about where I’m going, until I’m wriggling past the collapse (it’s safe enough; Fee has better stone-sense than I do, or so he says) and then I’m _out_ and the wind whips at my hair and it’s cold still this high up.

It’s cold here all spring and all summer.

The sky is wide and blue and bright and I hear a hawk crying. It’s _wrong_ to be here alone. This is _our_ place. (No one else cares; Fee says this was a guard-post when there first was a kingdom here. First Age. But that’s stupid. What use is a guard-post that faces West? There’s nothing there but the sea.)

The sun has come up over the mountain when I was climbing. They said they would leave at once after breakfast. Uncle Thorin and Mister Dwalin. And Fee.

I never wanted to be saying farewells. The wind stings my eyes and I squint at the sun. Wee snotty pebbles cry, and I’m almost taller than Fee.

‘Kíli?’ And first I think I’m hearing things, because _no one_ ever comes up here. No one but us. Then _amad_ sighs. ‘I know you’re out there. Give me a hand here; I won’t fit through.’

I wipe my face on my sleeve and get up. _Amad_ stands just behind the collapse and it’s true; she can’t fit through where Fee and I could. She pats at a broken slab just at the edge of the opening. ‘You pull, I push,’ she says.

‘But it’s not stable,’ I argue, ‘it will all come down. Fee said it would.’

_Amad_ shakes her head. ‘Not if we move only this one.’ She runs first one hand, then both over the outermost stone, then the ones around it, knocks her knuckles against each, one, two, three times. ‘It only holds up itself. And leans outwards. Now pull.’

Somehow the stone feels both rough and slippery when I grip it, and my arms and shoulders burn under the weight of it. I can see only the top of _amad_ ’s head when she leans her shoulder into the stone. The slab shifts under my hands and I can’t hear a thing over the screech of stone on stone. But I know well enough to back off without being told.

The stone topples over, and I hold my breath. The collapse sighs and whispers and settles. _Amad_ steps through and walks right past me to the edge where we have been putting the old drystone wall back up again. She leans over and looks down. It’s a sheer drop, eighty, maybe ninety ells. We are high up, as high as can get. She pokes at the ashes in our firepit with the toe of her boot and looks over her shoulder. ‘You’ve been bringing coal up here?’

‘Some,’ I shrug. It is cold up here, even in sunshine, and there’s no sense freezing our balls off.

‘Good thinking,’ she says and sits down, cross-legged, into the lee of the wall. I stand there next to the broken-off slab we toppled over (or _amad_ did; she’s frightfully strong when she means to be) and stare at her sitting there, eyes closed and face turned towards the sun. She’s leaning back into the wall we built, Fee and I, as if she trusts it to hold and not to tumble her straight off the face of the mountain. ‘Here,’ she says and pats the winter-yellow grass right next to her, ‘have a seat.’

And I can’t help smiling, just a bit, as I go and flop down beside her. We sit there a long while without talking, long enough that the cold starts creeping from the stone through the thin grass and my layers and into my skin. I wait for _amad_ to get up first. She brushes dirt off the back of her tunic and gazes into the horizon, hand over her eyes against the sun.

‘Fine day,’ she says.

‘Could have gone hunting,’ I say, and bite back the ‘we’ that wanted to come out first.

‘Don’t even think to sneak off alone,’ _amad_ says, as she would. ‘Bad enough when it was the pair of you.’

Unfair. Fee gets to see everything, and _amad_ wants _me_ to stick in the mountain like a _child._ Well, she can try.

‘How about we go tomorrow if the weather holds?’

And I must look a right fool, because _amad_ ruffles my hair and smiles like she wants to laugh.

‘I can’t shoot worth a tinker’s cuss, but I learned to set a fine trap when I was not much older than you. And that is a skill you don’t forget.’

‘But–’ I start. Uncle left _amad_ in charge. She has a _mountain_ to look after; she can’t be running off into the forest with me.

‘No buts,’ she says. ‘Most things will wait a day or two, but never a weather this fine.’

There’s no turning her head when she’s like that; and so we go hunting the next day.

And many times after, all through spring and summer until the day right at the start of autumn when they come back.

I grew taller over the summer, but Fee has grown more. He has _at least_ an inch on me now, and he’s broader too, and brown and weather-beaten from the road. But he’s _home_.

‘Hey, Kee,’ he says and knocks his forehead against mine. I try to tread on his foot, but he dodges, the bastard, and we shuffle and wrestle until I don’t care who gets the upper hand. I just hug him. He laughs, then starts wheezing like a broken set of bellows. ‘Let go, you sod, I can’t breathe.’

‘So,’ he says when I step back, ‘what did you do here all summer?’

‘Nothing much,’ I shrug. ‘Went hunting with Ma.’ And I grin at the look on his face. Fee might have gone smithing in the towns and villages of Men, and seen miles and miles of road, but I’m the one who went trapping coneys with _amad_ . ‘We meant to go  tracking deer next week. Ask her if you can come too.’

We track deer the week after, the three of us, and wolves, when the snow sets in. It is the best winter I ever had.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Amad_ : khuzdûl for 'mother'.
> 
> My thanks to hattedhedgehog for coining the word 'pebble'.


End file.
